Spirit of Knowledge school closing for good

WORCESTER — Spirit of Knowledge Charter School leaders voted 4-3 to surrender their school's charter at a meeting Tuesday night that was the contentious, ugly culmination of three years of board dysfunction.

WORCESTER — Spirit of Knowledge Charter School leaders voted 4-3 to surrender their school's charter at a meeting Tuesday night that was the contentious, ugly culmination of three years of board dysfunction.

Students' classes are over. Students and families will come to the school to collect records and plan their transition to Worcester public schools or elsewhere. Dean of Students David S. Cutler promised Spirit of Knowledge's 155 students that they would have a chance to say goodbye to one another, but there would be no more school.

The meeting, the third over the past six days, took place amid students' sobs and shouting that came mostly from the adults. A police officer removed one woman from the packed classroom. One board member, Abel Molina, started pointing fingers at the executive director and others, and Mr. Cutler at one point insisted on hearing answers from Business Manager Darlene Frederick instead of the board member in charge of finances.

Students, especially the seniors, were somewhat more focused. They just wanted to know where they were going to go to school. "As seniors, can you please tell us whether we're going to be here or not?" one girl asked after the meeting had gone 90 minutes without a vote.

The immediate cause of the school's closure was that it simply ran out of money. It had been running month-to-month with the help of a line of credit from Commerce Bank, but fewer students showed up in the fall than expected, which meant the school would receive less money from the state. Commerce froze its credit line. The state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education was ready to step in once the school couldn't afford to pay its employees, and that was going to happen in November, Spirit of Knowledge Trustees Chairman Barrington A. Henry said earlier.

Other events brought the school to that point. In May, the state put the school on probation, citing its four executive directors in three years, financial instability, lack of effective governance from the board of trustees, failure to deliver the academic model proposed in its charter, and lower than expected enrollment.

The school's financial instability stemmed, in part, from a $185,000 loss in the school's first year, 2010-2011, when a developer took the school's money for a building that never materialized. Despite a court judgment, the school could not recoup the cost.

It has always leased space, most recently at the former St. Paul's Elementary School at 19 Chatham St.

The school needed a $200,000 line of credit to stay open, officials said last week.

Executive Director Paula Bailey was a teacher at the school when she was asked to lead it in 2012. At the time, she said, she did not ask about the financial situation. "These kids were my kids," she said during Tuesday's meeting. She and Mr. Cutler had 25 days to find a building after the lease with All Saints Church ended, renovate the space and move in. "I didn't think about past opening," she said. "We would open and figure it out..."

"We were at 177, 180. One eighty-five was not a stretch for us to open the beginning of this year... We opened at 172... This all spiraled out of control, but just a few weeks ago, this isn't something we could have predicted."

Tuesday's meeting included parents making several verbal attacks on Ms. Frederick and calling her names, and Mr. Henry struggled to keep order among the more than 100 people packed into the room and hallway outside. Mr. Cutler was one of the few people the crowd listened to, and he had their vocal approval when he asked Ms. Frederick for numbers.

Many parents carried their students' report cards, which were released Tuesday, and which many said showed how much their students had thrived at the school. "There are good things going on in this school," said Patrick Hopkins, a parent. He and many others struggled to understand why the successes that students experienced individually were being undermined by governance and finances.

"Why weren't the parents told that this school was in dire need of money?" Mr. Hopkins said. "I'd give every last dime for my son to graduate from this school."

While the school's 10th grade English language arts MCAS scores were above the state average, the rest were no better than Worcester public schools' for Grades 7-12.

Freddy Torres, another parent, asked why his son has straight As, but the MCAS scores did not reflect that.

About 76 percent of the school's student body comes from low-income students, an even higher percentage than in Worcester public schools. It's unlikely that many of them will enroll in private schools, and some said there are no slots at the only charter school in the city that has a high school — Abby Kelley Foster Charter Public School.

Yetzaida Rosario, whose son is a senior, said, with the help of Mr. Molina translating, that the tight-knit senior class will be scattered to graduate "with strangers."

After the meeting, sophomore Todi Akindude said, "It's like my heart got ripped out of my chest and got stomped all over."

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